> I personally don't have much gripe against sudo
The gripe probably isn't with sudo as such so much as the way it's configured on Ubuntu by default.
In particular, on Debian you use the root password to do admin functions with sudo; whereas, on Ubuntu you use your *own* password to gain root privs. I suspect this is what the other poster is complaining about.
Which way is better depends on the circumstances. For the systems I administer, as it happens, the Debian way is significantly preferable; but I can easily imagine multi-admin scenarios where the Ubuntu setup would result in better overall security and accountability. What's really needed, IMO, is some good documentation on how to decide which configuration is right for any given system (and how to make the change if necessary).
Realistically, anyone with physical access can easily get the passwords anyway, by using a hosts file (or equivalent) to cause them to be sent to a local http server.
So yeah, if your computer is not physically secure (and most aren't), don't store data on it that you need to keep secret.
It's not SSL as such that's broken.
HTTPS is broken, not because it uses _SSL_, but rather because of the _way_ it uses it, which was designed wrong.
But SSL itself is also used in other contexts, some of which are not broken in the same way as HTTPS. (SSH, for instance, uses SSL in a more reasonable way and consequently is a good deal more secure than HTTPS.)
My home network is wired because at the time I installed it, 100BaseT gear was affordable and provided a great deal more bandwidth than the wireless networking technology available (to ordinary middle-class mortals) at the time. It wasn't even close enough to warrant serious consideration: I could spend 10-20 times as much and get flaky unreliable wireless gear that topped out at speeds that would only be suitable for low-bandwidth usage (e.g., web browsing), or I could spend a significantly more reasonable amount of money and get a network twenty times as fast that would actually be realistically usable for things I wanted to do, like file sharing and X11 forwarding. It was a no-brainer: CAT5 and FastEthernet were clearly the only way to go.
I don't know how the latest wireless (n?) compares to current wired technologies in terms of bandwidth or reliability; maybe it's caught up now and would be fast enough. I also haven't priced it, so maybe it would be cheap enough now. But since my existing infrastructure is fully meeting all of my networking needs, I haven't yet developed a reason to bother upgrading it. I have concerns about the reliability of current wireless networking technologies, but I haven't made it a priority to evaluate these concerns to determine whether they have real merit, because I don't really need to know right now, since I'm not currently looking to upgrade.
When I do need for some reason to upgrade my network, I'll look at the cost and performance and other characteristics of networking technologies available then and pick out whatever makes sense.
So yeah, my network is currently all wired.
Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny. -- Frank Hubbard